Skip to Main Content

AHSS Teaching and Research Support: Dissertations and other Grey Literature

A Guide to Library support for AHSS research students at Ulster

Theses & Dissertations available online



The British Library's EThoS service provides abstract records for over 500,000 UK doctoral dissertations. Once registered, you can get full-text access to approximately half of these by limiting the keyword search to those theses 'available for immediate download'. Registration is free. Many records also have the symbol indicating that they are freely available from the relevant University's repository. 

NOTE: EThOS records are available in USearch Use the Content Provider filter to limit to those from EThOS.
The full-text EThOs service is currently unavailable due to a hacking incident and there is no date for restoration of the service. However, individual theses may be still be available from the originating institution's research portal or repository.

Many of the Library databases contain records relating to dissertations and theses, both national and international. The majority of these are available as abstracts only, although some will have a longer extract or preview.

Theses and Dissertation records in Library databases

There are specialist databases providing records for UK and Irish dissertations (see below). However, other subject databases will also provide information about dissertations and theses, mostly as a filter or limiter on the main search or results. Some are listed below:

Conference Papers

High quality research often appears first in the form of conference papers or posters. There are a number of sources you can check to locate conference papers or set up alerts to papers matching your research topic.

Institutional Repositories

Most Universities now provide access to the research output of their academic/research staff and students, via an institutional repository link such as PURE. 

Full-text availability is not guaranteed, although many institutions comply with Open Access agreements.

What is Grey Literature

Often referred to as Grey (or Gray) Paper...

"In general, grey literature publications [...] may include, but are not limited to the following types of materials: reports (pre-prints, preliminary progress and advanced reports, technical reports, statistical reports, memoranda, state-of-the art reports, market research reports, etc.), theses, conference proceedings, technical specifications and standards, non-commercial translations, bibliographies, technical and commercial documentation, and official documents not published commercially (primarily government reports and documents)"

Source: www.greylit.org > What is Grey Literature?

Major sources of Grey Literature

Open Access Sources

Open Access refers to material that is free to all readers at the point of use. While it will mostly concern research output appearing in published books and journals, it may also contain material considered "grey literature" (such as pre-print articles, dissertations, data-sets, interview records, archives, or video and audio recordings).

The Library has compiled a fuller guide to the issues relating to Open Access and it is available below:

Government, Parliamentary or Statistical sources

Government publications, green and white papers, written answers or briefings. The Library has produced a guide to finding this type of information.

Evaluating Grey literature

Grey literature will not have gone through the same quality checking as peer reviewed material so additional careful evaluation of the source, the author and the contents is recommended.

Jessica Tyndall from Flinders University Medical Library in Australia has created a checklist of things to consider when trying to evaluate the importance of grey literature.

This checklist is called AACODs. The acronym stands for Authority - Accuracy - Coverage - Objectivity - Date - Significance. For a full explanation, see below:

Should you include Grey Literature in your Research?

  • Material which is published may contain positive publication bias, i.e. negative results are minimised in the final version but more fully reported in the grey literature.

  • Material which goes through the peer review process takes longer to appear than material published in conference papers, blogs, newsletters or other ephemera. The grey paper sources can be more current or respond more quickly to changes in fast moving subjects, than the traditional model.

  • On the other hand, grey paper material may not have gone through the same quality checking as peer reviewed material so additional careful evaluation of the source, the author and the contents is recommended.

  • Grey paper may cover very specialist topics or those with specific local interest and therefore not well represented in published research, or in the case of market or industry reports, only available via expensive subscriptions or hidden behind company intranets or firewalls. 

  • Indeed only a small percentage of "The Internet" is searchable by the web crawlers of search engines. The rest forms part of the Invisible Web

Health and Social Care

 

Image Courtesy: http://tinyurl.com/pfhq2yo

Grey Literature for Medicine and Health research is an extremely important element of systematic searching.Below are links to guides to sources of grey literature for this subject area.